Found this on 1UP.com, sounds good. I am a fan of the lego games so I will be keeping my eyes on this.

Full disclosure: Hearst, the parent company of 1UP, is an investor in many other businesses, including Gazillion, Lego Universe's publisher.

Quote:

When I first heard about NetDevil's new MMO LEGO Universe, I was intrigued. A little confused, but definitely intrigued. Thoughts of loot, level grinding, raids, and fun social experiences flooded my mind, and I was curious how the game would integrate these aspects into the LEGO world. But what I saw during my first look at the game went a long way towards explaining just what to expect from the MMO.

LEGO Universe is immediately reminiscent of the console LEGO games, which is smart. Obviously, the popular building blocks company has a lot of say in what their pieces should look like, so I would have been surprised if the MMO looked that much differently; but even little touches from the console games have been adopted, like the quick-building, where you hold down a button while standing near a pile of unassembled blocks to piece together helpful structures like bridges or jump pads in a flash.

More noteworthy is Universe's attempt to bring over the console games' action platforming gameplay, with you double-jumping from platform to platform to recover items, or smashing on the attack button to bust up enemies. This ignores MMO tropes like leveling and experience points in the process... to a degree. After all, how fun would an MMO be without a sense of character progression? In Universe, you don't gain experience points by killing baddies (actually, NetDevil stressed the fact that nothing ever "dies"; it simply smashes into blocks, and players get "reassembled" rather than "respawn"). Instead, you rely on the items you earb from smashing enemies, treasure chests, or sometimes just environmental objects (again, like in the console games) to upgrade your self-created LEGO person. Instead of levels, Universe has a simple hearts system to represent your hit points. Some clothing pieces may grant you extra hearts or new abilities (like being able to charm an animal to become your pet), and on rare occasions, an item may even grant a permanent heart.

Like in any other MMO, quests you accept from non-player characters will task you with missions where you have to collect objects or defeat enemy characters, but Universe will also ask you to create. In the starting area, the player has to build a rocket ship in order to escape to one of the several other worlds. To do so, you must first find the three ship parts hidden around the immediate vicinity and then put on a literal thinking hat. This will put your character out of phase with the rest of the MMO world, and while the other players will be able to see you standing there, the thought bubbles coming out of your head will tell them that you're in the "building" mode. From your perspective, everything but the building area on the floor will fade out. Nothing can harm you when you're in this state, so you're free to take your time and arrange your ship parts in the way you wish. You simply drag the parts out of your inventory and plop them into the world, rotating or placing them together at your leisure.

After a successful launch, you can travel from world to world, which can be overrun with pirates or ninjas or robots, or any other manner of interesting LEGO people, inhabiting places from jungles to beaches. One area I saw during the presentation even gave players the option of co-creating a large racecourse with other players. Universe will launch with just a few such worlds, with plans to expand by releasing new content frequently, though a schedule has not yet been made public.

Other areas will have building areas like this that present you with build topics (for example, one inside a cave may ask you to build your idea of a bat). Though the moderation process is still unclear, NetDevil claims that the creations will pass through some sort of approval process before other players will ever see the content (so that means no dong monsters, folks).

But upgrading your character isn't the only incentive you'll have for taking on quests and exploring the world. As you play, you'll come across thousands of LEGO bricks, and you can then take the ones you've collected and use them to build whatever your imagination fancies in your very own hunk of LEGO land. It's my understanding that your friends will be able to come by your private space and check out your creations, and plans for allowing you to set custom animations to your LEGO creations are also in the works.

Though the few areas I saw still required a bit of optimization to get rid of the graphical hiccups, I'm anxious to get my hands on LEGO Universe whenever it goes into beta -- presumably next year. Honestly, if NetDevil manages to pull it off, I think they stand to gain a lot. I know a handful of young boys and girls who would jump at the chance to lose themselves in this world -- and I, for one, would be right there with them.

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